The Hex Breaker's Eyes (12 page)

We sneak out
the back door and go to our separate homes. I feel oddly compelled
to go by Sydney’s and see what she’s up to, but I realize that
would be returning to the scene of the crime; not a good instinct.
I go home.

My dad has
heard from the school that I skipped most of the day. I try to
explain that I was helping a girl who got injured, but he doesn’t
believe me. I’m grounded for two weeks. No leaving the house except
for school. My brother Devon keeps dropping by my room to taunt
me.

Sydney’s not at
school today (she’s suspended, which is not nearly enough
punishment by the way), but the word through the grapevine is that
Wayne dumped her over the weekend. Maybe having a girlfriend who
has fights in the cafeteria is bad for politics. I go my locker
expecting Tam until I realize she won’t be here all week since Tam
got an even worse suspension than Sydney.

I attend my
first two classes without incident, and when I go to change out the
books in my bag, Wayne passes my locker. He makes eye contact,
staring at me with those blue eyes, shakes his head and moves on
without a word. I think the things I’ve done over the last couple
weeks have drastically altered his life. His girlfriend is out of
the picture, his student council future uncertain. Now that I think
about it, he has been a pretty good president. He always works hard
at all the fundraisers, leads the crowd in cheers at football games
(our actual cheerleaders never get the crowd to care) and seems to
really have fun doing all those things. Now he’s likely to lose to
Dina, who will be boring and borderline useless as a president. As
he passes me, Wayne looks sort of lost, and I wish I was good
enough at talking to people that I could think of something
comforting to say.

I’m eating
lunch with Marlene, sitting at my locker like usual, when a group
of girls walks by. I pay them only enough attention to see that two
of them have followed Melanie Woods into wearing bow ties around
their necks. God I hate that one person’s desperate grab at
attention can actually become fashionable to other people. I really
don’t understand how ironically wearing something to make fun of it
can become trendsetting and make the stupid thing fashionable.
Anyway, the moment I see the stupid ties on these girls I look
away, so I’m a little surprised when one of them stops in front of
us, looking down at me.

It’s Dina
Jennings, her arm in a sling (and thankfully, no bow tie around her
neck). Her friends, a couple of other well-dressed senior girls,
turn back and wonder why she stopped. There’s a reason I didn’t
recognize her: Dina’s not glowing. She’s just an ordinary,
flesh-and-blood girl. No yellow light, no tentacles of energy.

“Thanks,” Dina
says to me. “I can tell you helped.”

“You can?”

“I can just
feel it. Here, see.” She pulls a quarter out of her pocket and
flips it, catching it in her right hand and slapping it down on the
back of her left. “Heads or tails?”

“Heads.”

Dina looks at
the coin, then leans down to show it to us. It’s tails. Dina
smiles. “You think I could have won a coin toss yesterday?”

“I guess not,”
I say.

“I don’t know
what you girls did, but I owe you.”

One of Dina’s
friends chimes in. “Who are these weirdoes and why are you talking
to them?”

Dina snaps
right back at her, “They’re not weirdoes. This is Mindee and she’s
the girl who warned me I was going to fall. She saved my life.” She
doesn’t even pause before she provides an explanation: “Without
Mindee I would have broken my neck instead of my collarbone.”

“Whatever, her
shouting probably made you fall,” says the other friend.

“Have you ever
heard of being nice to people? You know, being grateful for
things?” Dina says. Her friends are dumbfounded, looking at each
other in total confusion. Dina smiles at us and then rejoins her
friends. “Come on, let’s go eat.” The three of them vanish around
the corner, leaving us alone in the hallway again.

“I think you
have more than just the power to see hexes,” Marlene says. “I think
you’re full-blown miraculous.”

“Oh yeah?” I
say, biting into a cracker.

“Yeah.”

“What makes you
so sure?” I say though a mouthful of crumbs.

“Because anyone
who can make Dina Jennings be considerate is a fricking Jedi.”

We break into
laughter, and soon enough we can’t stop laughing. Other kids enter
the hallway and stare at us, but we don’t stifle ourselves. We
can’t. We laugh until we cry. We broke a hex, we saved a life. We
won.

It’s been a few
months since we got rid of the hex. Sydney still goes to the same
school as us, but there hasn’t been any backlash from her. She
never made any move to get revenge on Tam for getting her
suspended, and none of the students at school have had any glowy
lights around them since Dina’s hex was broken. My theory on the
matter is that Sydney didn’t realize what she was doing, or know
that her hex actually worked. Once the talisman was gone, the hex
was broken, and that seems to have been the end of it. It’s a new
year, a new semester, and in a few months Dina, Sydney, and the
other seniors will be out of my life forever.

This semester
I’m lucky enough to have my best friend in class with me. Two
classes, in fact. We’re in our second-period French class, sitting
next to each other, when Tam says something absolutely
shocking.

“I’m thinking
about breaking up with Ryan,” she whispers. I can’t even figure out
what to say to her after that, so I listen to Mme. St. Pierre talk
about past tense for a while. Eventually I pass Tam a note saying
we can talk after class. There’s too much weight and importance in
the one sentence she said to me, that we can’t possibly have that
conversation in French class.

For the rest of
the class I can sense that she’s really antsy, but it’s not like we
can work through her emotional problems with thirty other people
conjugating verbs all around us.

We finally get
released from class. This term we both have third period lunch,
while Ryan is still on a schedule with a fourth period lunch. We’ll
be able to talk about him without him being there. We still have
the same side-by-side lockers so we go there, take our lunches out,
and sit on the floor.

“So you’re
thinking of
what
?” I say.

“I’m thinking
of breaking up with him,” she says, in a quiet voice that’s very
unnatural for her.

“But why? You
guys are my idols. If you can’t be happy what’ll I ever be?”

“We just don’t
see each other much. It’s basketball tournament season, so he’s
gone most weekends. He has practice after school. We don’t even
have lunch together. I think it would just be easier.”

I nod my head,
eat my sandwich, and for a while we don’t say anything. “Whatever
makes you happy, I guess. But I would just say to think about the
long term. What will make you happier once basketball season is
over? Would you wish you had him back?”

She nods a
little, thinks about things, and says. “Yeah, I know. I haven’t
made up my mind yet.”

“You can call
me when you want to talk,” I say.

“You mean I can
call your house.”

“Shut up. Cell
minutes are expensive if you have to pay for them yourself.”

She smiles.
“But I don’t. I have an iii-phooone.” She’s been taunting me about
that ever since her folks gave her the phone for her
Christmas-and-birthday-because they’re-ten-days-apart gift. “I
guess I can text your cell to make sure you’re at home,” she says,
and sticks out her tongue at me.

After lunch, we
go to separate classes. Tam has history this term and I’m taking
calculus. I sit down with Janelle, the girl who unsuccessfully ran
for Student Council President last term. She’s a quiet, nerdy girl
who likes math, and that suits me just fine. (Yeah, I suppose we’re
both math nerds). Eventually the bell rings, but Janelle and I are
still cross-checking our answers so we’re the last to leave.

We have to rush
to get to our last classes of the day, which in my case is English.
The class has already started so my entrance interrupts the
teacher, and I feel everyone look at me as I make my way to the
back to sit with Tamara. Once we get settled in, class goes
fine.

“What are you
thinking?” I whisper during the time at the end of class where are
supposed to be reading, “about Ry?”

“I still think
it would be best,” she says. The teacher looks our way so we go
back to reading until the bell rings. At our lockers, Ryan meets up
with us.

“You coming to
watch the game?” he asks me. Behind his back, Tam shakes her head
at me.

“Not tonight,”
I say.

“Come on, you
haven’t been to a game since school came back,” he complains.

I pack up my
homework, and Tam just jams her stuff into her locker since she’s
going to hang around for a while and watch the game. That means I
have to walk home alone, but whatever, I’m used to it.

It’s almost
eleven at night when my doorbell rings. I answer it, and Tam’s
waiting outside. I invite her in out of the cold and we head down
to the basement where we can be alone without going upstairs where
my family might hear.

“What’s up?” I
ask.

“I broke up
with Ryan,” she says bluntly.

“Already? I
thought you were going to think about it?”

“I have been. I
was just tired of sitting around by myself while he was off with
the team.”

“Tam,” I say,
“are you sure about this?”

“No,” she says.
“I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Well, whenever
you figure it out you should tell him. But try to figure it out
quick before anyone else makes a move on your guy.”

“Yeah,” she
says. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“How did he
take it?”

“It hurt a lot.
He was just sort of quiet. I think he had no idea it was
coming.”

“Try to sleep,”
I say. “See how you feel in the morning.”

“Yeah,” she
says. “Oh God, what if this was a mistake?”

We talk for a
bit, I give her a big hug and we start to head back upstairs so she
can go home. Just as we get to the top of the stairs, a cool blue
light appears around Tam.

I close my eyes
and try to make it go away, but when I open them again, the blue
light is still there. It glows all around her body, a pale blue
aura that clings so close to her.

“What is it?”
she asks when she sees my face. “What’s wrong?”

“What time is
it?”

“What?”

“What time is
it, check your phone.” She pulls out the phone and looks.

“Eleven
thirty.”

“Exactly?”

“What”

“Is it exactly
eleven thirty?”

“Yes.” She hold
up the phone for me to see. “What is wrong with you? I’m supposed
to be the crazy one right now.”

“Not like
this,” I say. “You can’t compete with my kind of crazy.”

“What?” she
asks, and then her eyes go wide and she realizes what I mean. “Are
you seeing something?”

“Yeah,” I
nod.

She looks
around expecting to see something, then she turns back, “On
me?”

“Yeah,” I say.
“Somebody put a hex on you.”

We spent the
night on the phone after Tam got home, talking about what the hex
could be and where it could have come from. Obviously, the biggest
suspect is Sydney. She knows that Tam was aware of her hexing Dina,
and since I managed to get away from Sydney’s house mostly unseen,
she might not know that I was the one who stole her talisman. Maybe
she’s getting back at Tam for that.